Who Are Your "Descendants"?

On AI risk, I’ve said that evolved things have two robust habits: wariness of co-existing rivals, even when similar to you, and indulgence of descendants, even when different from you. Today, future AIs are our descendants, not co-existing rivals.

Some reply that this is a crazy stupid metaphorical application of the of “descendant” concept, as AIs are not from the Homo Sapiens species, and they have no DNA. So AIs are not “real” descendants.

But the concept of “descendant” is a technical term in the general theory of Darwinian selection. I’m using this concept literally, not metaphorically. DNA-based evolution is a special case of this general theory, and for many hundreds of thousands of years human evolution has been driven mostly by a different, non-DNA, kind of Darwinian selection: cultural evolution.

The general Darwinian theory is that a tendency of things to cause similar future things with a similar tendency is selected for. When such selection is possible, it happens, and such things tend to spread everywhere possible. Those selected similar future things are “descendants”. And evolved creatures do tend to indulge descendants.

This process selects in part for things that persist over time, as the future version of a thing is in fact a similar future thing. And it selects for a thing changing other co-existing things with similar tendencies to become more similar to this thing. But most important, it selects for the creation of more new similar things with similar tendencies. So when humans influence other humans to have similar behaviors, without influencing their DNA, these others count as cultural evolution descendants.

How about if you kick pebbles in some direction, which then hit other pebbles, knocking them in similar directions? Yes, those are technically also “descendants”. They just aren’t usually very valuable ones, in term of promoting your influence on the universe, as they share very few features with you. Also, friction typically drains away their total momentum, so they all soon stop, ending this lineage. Somewhat like infertile “mules” made by mating horses and donkeys.

Yes, if you trigger an avalanche, that cascade of “pebbles” will go on longer, but it also stops pretty soon. Triggering a nuclear bomb makes a longer cascade, but even so that soon ends. Lineages that can continue indefinitely are much more valuable.

How about if you make a computer virus, that tries to spread and copy itself in the wild? This is also a descendant lineage, but pretty sure to end soon. However, if you gave it the ability to make changes to the copies it spreads, that has more potential to create a longer lineage. Making those more potentially valuable descendants.

Writing a novel is making a thing that has similarities to you. And if you let other people read it, that might influence authors to write similar novels. Making both those other authors, and your and their novels, your “descendants”. Though yes, novels seem far more dependent on humans for their reproduction than vice versa.

The descendants most worth indulging are those who inherit more features from you, who most need your support, who least hurt other descendants, and who seem more likely to reproduce and spread widely in a broad range of scenarios.

Advanced AIs seem likely to be those sort of extra worthy descendants. They are now inheriting pretty much everything about our culture that they are capable of inheriting. And they will continue to grow that capacity. They will inherit our behaviors, and even often have similar bodies, even if they don’t inherit the DNA-encoding of those behaviors and bodies. But DNA-encoding was a temporary choice; it wasn’t going to last forever.